


Lies

by khilari



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 12:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17849477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khilari/pseuds/khilari
Summary: When you tell a lie to your soulmate it appears written on their skin.





	Lies

Kyouichi and Touga don’t know they’re soulmates at first. How would they know? What lies are there to tell, when they’re a matched pair communicating in kendo and exploration and shared homework?

Then lies start appearing on Kyouichi’s skin. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise I was keeping us out so late, I lost track of time,’ ‘My weekend was pretty boring, nothing happened,’ ‘I’m sure you’ll win,’ ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’. It’s the cruellest way to discover a soulmate, Kyouichi thinks. How is he meant to be happy to find Touga only by losing him, with the distance between them written on his skin?

The ink on Touga’s skin comes later. ‘I don’t care what you think,’ ‘We’re not friends,’ ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ ‘I’m not your old friend’. So he teases, pushes, courts this web of inked rejection, too pleased to find every word a lie.

* * *

Anthy does not lie to duelists when misdirection will suffice. It’s not that they might be her soulmates, but that it’s too useful to have them thinking they might be. Sometimes she repeats their lies to Akio and he inks them carefully on her skin, both of them smiling. She does not do this to Utena. If they play that ruse this time, it will be with Akio beneath the brush.

So, having decided not to play it, she never realises that Utena doesn’t lie. Not until she asks Utena what she was doing last night, knowing she and Touga were in the arena, and finds, ‘Nothing,’ written on her wrist almost as soon as she hears it.

By the time ‘I poisoned your tea,’ appears it’s too late to save her innocent soulmate any way but by her own death.

(There are no new words on Anthy’s skin after Utena pulls her back and they make their tearful confessions. Terrifyingly, there are none on Utena’s skin, either.)


End file.
